Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Minorities need a land of their own

Female members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and an Iraqi
Kurdish Peshmerga fighter take position on the front line in Makhmur,
some 50 km south of Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region
of northern Iraq, on 9th August 2014. (Image: SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty
Images)

What lesson can Jews teach Yazidis and Christians in Iraq? The unfashionable idea that without a homeland to call their own they will always be at the mercy of others, Ed West blogs in the Spectator (with thanks: Lily)

A clear lesson that the Yazidis and Christian
Assyrians have learned is that without a patch of land for oneself, and
soldiers to protect it, no people is safe.

Ten years ago, when the pogrom against Iraq’s Christians began with a
number of church bombings and sectarian murders, Christian leaders in
that country proposed an administrative area in the Nineveh Plains where
Iraq’s minorities, including the Assyrians and Yazidis, and smaller but
equally persecuted groups like the Shabak and Mandeans, would have political and military autonomy, with a police force composed of minorities to protect them.

Iraq’s more powerful groups rejected the idea, and the Americans did
nothing to help; the counter-argument was that Iraq’s minorities should
be encouraged to remain part of a multi-denominational country, and that
a safe haven would be a magnet for jihadis. The former argument is fine
in theory, but the latter looks rather irrelevant now.

The lesson of history, especially Europe’s, is that without a
homeland or safe area of its own, no minority is ever entirely safe. The
Kurds learned this lesson under Saddam Hussein. After 1991 Iraqi
Kurdistan gained de facto autonomy. Now it looks certain to
emerge as a nation-state. While I cannot say what will happen in the
battle between the Islamic State and the Peshmerga (Kurdish fighters),
Kurdistan will certainly survive and will have even acquired a
foundation myth, its status in the world elevated after a struggle
against an evil enemy.

For a long time now there has been an idea among many western
intellectuals that we had somehow outgrown the nation-state. No one told
the Kurds, obviously. And while nationalism is discredited because of
its associations with 1914-45, it can also act as a counter-balance to
other forces, namely religious extremism. It may not be coincidence that
Turkey, the one Islamic nation in the region with a very strong
national identity, is the most resistant to Islamism; perhaps it is only
a matter of time but second-generation Turks in Europe also seem far
less prone to religious extremism than men whose families hail from weak
states with multiple, competing identities, such as Pakistan. (I’m not
suggesting this is the main reason — Pakistan is, after all, much more
religious than Turkey.)

One Iraqi minority, of course, learned this lesson very, very
painfully some time ago. Baghdad was one-third Jewish a century ago. Had
Israel not come into existence, how might Iraq’s Jews have fared today? Not very well, I’d imagine.Read article in full

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In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)